"I've tried to look through it myself," Margaret said."But it's password protected.I didn't know her password.I tried her birthday, my birthday, our old address, our dog's name.Everything I could think of.Nothing worked."
"I might know someone who can help with that."Kari thought of the tech specialists she'd worked with in Phoenix, the ones who could crack phones and recover deleted data.She might be able to call in a favor.
"Would you trust me to take this?"she asked."I promise I'll return it when I'm done."
Margaret's eyes filled with tears."Take it.Please.Find out what happened to my daughter.That's all I want.That's all I've wanted for eight months, while everyone else told me to let it go, to accept reality, to move on."Her voice hardened."I'll never move on.Not until someone answers for what they did to my baby."
Kari put the phone in her pocket and stood."I'll be in touch as soon as I know anything."
"Detective Blackhorse?"Margaret stood as well, reaching out to take Kari's hand in both of hers.Her grip was tight, desperate."Thank you.For believing me.For caring about Jennifer.Everyone else just wrote her off as another troubled model who couldn't handle the pressure.But she was more than that.She was my daughter.She was everything to me."
"I know she was."Kari squeezed the woman's hands."I'm going to find out who did this to her.I promise."
Outside, the afternoon sun was bright and warm, but Kari felt cold.She sat in her car and stared at the phone in her hand—Jennifer Blake's phone, holding eight months of secrets that no one had bothered to uncover.The police had looked through it and found nothing relevant.But they'd also ruled the death a suicide and closed the case in less than forty-eight hours.They hadn't been looking for what Kari was looking for.
Jennifer had been involved with someone possessive.Someone who wouldn't let go.Someone she'd been trying to escape in the weeks before her death.
Was it Pemberton?He had access to the victims, prescribed them medications, could have used that position to manipulate them.Or Montgomery, with his unsettling photographs and the complaints that had mysteriously been withdrawn—a man who made a career out of capturing vulnerability, who pushed young women to emotional extremes and called it art?
Or was it someone else entirely—someone Kari hadn't identified yet, hiding in plain sight among the agency executives and hangers-on of the modeling world?
She needed to crack this phone.Needed to see Jennifer's messages, her call logs, her photos.Somewhere in there was the identity of the person who had killed her—and possibly the person who had killed Amanda Escalante, and Destiny Morales, and all the other young women whose deaths had been written off as sad but inevitable casualties of a brutal industry.
Kari started the car and headed back toward her hotel.She had calls to make and favors to call in.
The answers were close now.Just out of reach.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Kari had been staring at Jennifer Blake's phone for twenty minutes, watching as a progress bar crept slowly across the screen of her laptop.Remy Delacroix, her contact from the Phoenix PD tech unit, had explained the process to her remotely, walking her through each step like he'd done this a hundred times before.His voice came through her earbuds with the tinny quality of a long-distance call, punctuated by the occasional click of his keyboard in the background.
"Almost there," Remy said."Once it finishes, you'll have full access to everything—messages, photos, call logs, apps.But Kari, I'm doing this as a favor, off the books.Whatever you find, you didn't get it from me.I could lose my job if anyone finds out I helped crack a phone without proper authorization."
"Understood.I owe you one, Remy."
"You owe me about six at this point, but who's counting?"She could hear the smile in his voice."Good luck with whatever you're working on out there.Sounds like a tough one."
The call ended just as the progress bar completed.Kari disconnected the phone from her laptop and held it in her hand, feeling the strange intimacy of the moment.This pink case with its worn edges had been Jennifer Blake's constant companion for the last year of her life.She'd used it to take selfies at photo shoots, to text friends about parties, to call her mother on Sunday evenings.Every hope and fear and secret of her final months was stored somewhere in its memory.
And somewhere in that memory might also be the identity of whoever had killed her.
Kari opened the messages app and began scrolling through Jennifer's conversations.Most were mundane—scheduling texts with photographers about call times, group chats with other models complaining about demanding clients, occasional messages to her mother that grew increasingly brief and infrequent over the final months.The pattern was familiar: a young woman gradually isolating herself from her support system, pulling away from the people who loved her.
Or being pulled away.
One conversation stood out, both for its length and for the way it dominated Jennifer's recent messages.The thread stretched back nearly eight months, with hundreds of exchanges that grew more frequent and more intense as time went on.
The contact was saved simply as "M."
Montgomery.The name surfaced immediately in Kari's mind.But she pushed the assumption aside—M could stand for anything.A nickname, a last name, a term of endearment.She couldn't afford to lock onto a theory before she'd seen the evidence.
She opened the thread and began reading from the beginning, watching a relationship unfold in fragments of text.The early messages, from about eight months before Jennifer's death, were warm and supportive—the kind of messages you might get from a caring friend or mentor:
Just checking on you.You seemed stressed at the shoot today.Everything okay?
I made dinner tonight.Way too much for one person.Want to come over and help me eat it?
You're so talented, Jen.Don't let anyone make you feel otherwise.The industry can be cruel, but you have real potential.
